The Ultimate Truth Read Free Page A

even after I’d zoomed in as much
as I could, but I hadn’t really expected to see it anyway. The button camera that Dad had shown me was so small, and so well disguised, that it was virtually invisible to the naked eye. And
when I remembered that, I started to wonder if maybe I’d been imagining things. If a button camera is virtually invisible, how could I be sure that the man at the funeral was wearing one? All
I’d seen was a brief glint of reflected light. It could have come from anything – a metal button, a pin, a tiny piece of foil . . .
    I thought about that for a while, then I leaned forward and peered closely at the man’s face. His steely grey eyes were looking directly at me, but I guessed that wasn’t unusual. If
you see someone taking a picture of you, it’s quite normal to stare back at them. But he hadn’t just stared back at me, had he? He’d given me a very slight nod of his head, as if
he was acknowledging me. As I looked at him now, I could see that same acknowledgement in his eyes. It wasn’t a friendly look, but it wasn’t unfriendly either. It’s hard to
describe, but I got the impression that he was trying to share something with me.
    I thought about that for a while too, then I zoomed out and studied the whole photograph again. It showed the man just as he was reaching up to close the boot of his BMW. I focused on the boot,
enlarging it as much as I could, trying to see inside it, but the picture quality was too grainy to see anything clearly. I scrolled down a bit and stopped when the car’s registration plate
came into view. It was clearly visible. Easily readable. I stared at it, wondering, thinking . . .
    Although it’s illegal to trace the owner of a vehicle through its registration number, it’s not hard to do if you know the right people. And I knew for a fact that Grandad knew the
right people. He knows all kinds of people. I was pretty sure that if I gave him the registration number of the BMW and asked him to find out who owned it, it wouldn’t take him too long to
come up with a name. But no matter how much I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t ask Grandad to do that. Not while he was feeling so bad. It wouldn’t be fair.
    As Mum once told me, if you do your best to be kind and fair, you’ll never go too far wrong.
    I leaned back in my chair, stretched my neck and yawned, then rubbed the tiredness from my eyes and went back to studying the photograph.

5
    After breakfast the next morning, I asked Nan if it was all right if I went out on my bike for a while.
    ‘Of course it’s all right,’ she said, a little hesitantly. ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Nowhere really,’ I told her. ‘I just thought I’d ride around for a bit, you know . . . get some fresh air.’
    She looked at me. ‘Well, be careful, OK? And make sure you take your phone with you.’
    I nodded. ‘How’s Grandad today?’
    ‘Not too bad. He’s having a lie-in at the moment, which is a good sign. He hasn’t had much sleep recently.’ She smiled cautiously. ‘Hopefully he’ll feel a bit
better if he can get some rest.’
    I just nodded again, not sure what to say.
    ‘Go on, then,’ she said, ruffling my hair. ‘Go and get yourself some fresh air.’
    There wasn’t much fresh air along Long Barton Road, just the usual choke of exhaust fumes hazing in the heat of the traffic. Not that I minded. The smell of the streets
on the way into town always makes me feel like I’m going somewhere. And that’s what I needed just now – the feeling that I was going somewhere, the feeling that I was doing
something. I wasn’t sure why I needed it, and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing either, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was having some kind of
purpose.
    Nan and Grandad’s house isn’t far from town, about three kilometres at most, and it didn’t take long to get to the North Road roundabout, where the town centre really begins.
The roundabout was